AI IRL Podcast Episode 23: 5 Insights for Incredible SEO Results

One of the primary ways any SMB can impact their online presence is by leveraging the power of SEO.

On a recent episode of AI:IRL podcast, we interviewed Rich Fong, CEO of Bliss Drive. Bliss Drive has a simple mission with a challenging task: Help businesses increase sales and leads by delivering incredible SEO results.

We asked Rich for his top 5 insights with the most return for the least effort.

Exposure (visibility) to the right people (our prospects) at the right time (when they’re ready to take action).

The big bucks many companies spend on SEO often go wasted, because they aren’t targeting the right people at the right time. For example, there’s typically a 2-5% click-through rate on Google AdWords.

2: 98% of people aren’t clicking on that Google Ad

If 2% of people are clicking on the top-ranked, paid Google Ad topping the search results, that means 98% of people never touched it. Most of the time, people skip ads and go straight to the organic listings — because they’re more trustworthy and globally vetted by the community.

Flip the table and consider it from the content-originator’s perspective: Their organic listings are likely to garner the attention of those people who are their best-fit customers. (No one’s clicking on anything that doesn’t apply to them.)

Bottom line: Being listed organically in the number-one slot is a far better position to be in than purchasing AdWords — you’ll have better conversion, and a majority of the traffic will be from the people who are actually looking for you.

3: Remember the second algorithm

Think about SEO in terms of 2 algorithms:

Algorithm 1: the on-page algorithm

With the on-page algorithm, Google’s bot comes to your website and starts crawling. It obtains the high-level of what your website is about — they’ll read things like your title, your meta description, description of your content, etc.

Here, the goal is to ensure you don’t over or under optimize on certain areas. The problem with this piece is — it’s incredibly easy to replicate once someone has perfected it.

If you have the best practice for optimization, your competitor will simply copy you, because everything is right on the page. (This is a 2-way street: You could also copy your competitors.)

The question becomes: How does Google know who to rank number one? That’s where the second algorithm comes in.

Algorithm 2: the off-page algorithm

“Use content as the main driver for SEO.”

There are over 200 factors that affect your SEO, but the biggest piece (and the piece that really made Google’s search engine topple Yahoo and Microsoft), is this secondary algorithm that calculates a variety of factors, attempting to determine:

How authoritative is your website.

A primary way to determine a website’s authority, is by seeing how many backlinks it has. And the more authoritative those backlinks are, the more authoritative a website is considered — a backlink to your website originating from CNN will push your rankings up because of CNN’s credibility.

This is how Google became the number-one search engine. They had an AHA! moment when they realized that anyone could create a crawler for a website to determine the information that was available (the first algorithm), but no one was determining the power of authority (the second algorithm)

That’s how the secondary algorithm started. Now, with the off-page algorithm, Google is considering other signals as well, like social media, traficc, engagement, how long people are staying on a website, etc. Computers have more processing power now, so they can crunch more data.

4: Look at what your competitors are doing

SEO is going to vary by industry. SEO for e-commerce is very different than SEO for a B2B company, which will look different from the SEO for a local Professional Services Company.

But the best advice is pretty simple:

Look into your industry, and consider what the competitors on top are doing. There’s a reason they’re ranked number one. For example, if they have a chat, in might be a good idea for you to have a chat.

5: Use your words

Without diving deep into the technical pieces of SEO, Rich gave us simplified piece of advice:

Go long.

Here’s what he means:

Too many people create elaborate polished, image-heavy landing pages. Unfortunately, crawlers don’t read much of that (except for the tags). What they read is words.

So, yes, they will read the image tags, but you can one-up this with content.

Rich would challenge you to put 2,000 words of content on your landing page. This will help crawlers rank you, and it will help you rank for long-tail keywords.

This discussion with Rich Fong was taken from our AI: In Real Life. If you want to hear more AI episodes like this one, check us out on iTunes here.